Battery Giant Energizer About to Get a Charge for Mascot Mistreatment

ST. LOUIS, MO (AP)-Animal rights activists and environmentalist wackos rallied in the parking lot and thronged around the plant entrance of Energizer Holdings, Inc., home of the world famous Energizer bunny, to protest the unfair and inhuman treatment of the company's spokesrabbit.

For more than 2 decades the hapless rabbit has been forced to strap on an oversized bass drum and incessantly march around aimlessly beating the drum, at the same time contributing to excessive levels of noise pollution wherever the rabbit roams. This questionable advertising strategy thrust the battery baron into the neon glow of negativity, draining profits quite a bit quicker than the little drummer bunny drains the weighty dry cells strapped to its fragile body.

A SpoofNews investigation into the bunny's employment history yielded a sordid saga of substandard symptoms of abject abuse. Forced to appear at hi-vis events from convenience store openings to halftime performances at the SuperBowl, the rabbit has more overtime in a year than most Energizer executives in their entire careers. But even worse, the bunny was coerced into agreeing to be dyed pink to draw attention to the poor animal as an underhanded ploy to hawk Energizer's wares. If that's not enough, the rabbit has a morbid aversion to musical instruments, particularly those of the percussion persuasion. These facts alone shed a most unfavorable light on the manufacturer of mobile electrical power units.

While the bunny has refused numerous requests to be interviewed, those close to the mistreated mascot unanimously describe the aging animal as suffering from severe hearing loss, drummer's elbow and fallen arches from the countless miles he's traveled in his low voltage voyage. The rabbit has had to resort to wearing extra dark sunglasses, even at night, as his vision has been severely degraded by days on end without sleep. SpoofNews has also learned that, due to a bizarre stipulation of his employment contract, the bunny is obligated to stay pink and wear the bass drum at all times, even during the few and far between moments he collapses in total exhaustion for a never-long-enough nap.

Environmentalists are currently drawing up charges against Energizer, and by extension the bunny, for everything from indiscriminate rabbit droppings to haphazardly discarded dead double-a dry cells that they say are polluting the air and cluttering the highways and byways in the wake of the roaming rabbit.

This is not just a flash in the pan. Those on both sides of the animals in advertising arena claim this is but the tip of the iceberg. It won't be long before we see the current protest expanding to include the full range of commercialized critters. Today the Energizer bunny, tommorow the Geico gecko, the Budweiser Clydesdales, and MGM lion.

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